@Ardashir
Potatoes, tomatoes, AND peppers! And egglants, and ground cherries, and garden huckleberries, and goji berries, and tobacco. Not sweet potatoes, though.
@Power-Up&Sky-Blue
Being a chef is a lot more difficult in Equestria because you need to learn what all these different various species can eat. He was outright surprised when he learned most ponies don’t eat meat XD
@Ardashir
Oh yeah, you’d be surprised what things are related to what. Cashews are related to poison ivy and poison oak, which is why you can’t buy them in the shell: the shells are actually poisonous and will give you a rash :D
And potatoes and tomatoes are related to nightshade? That I did not know. Though some horseback riding local cops have told me that some people ask them to collect their horses’ droppings to fertilize their rosebeds and potato gardens.
raw potatoes can contain alkaloids, like solanine, but for the most part it’ll only be in trace amounts, as long as you don’t eat potatoes with actual leaves and vines coming from them. even potatoes that have already begun producing chlorophyl (and solanine) it says on snopes you’d have to eat about 4 pounds of them to get to the lethal dosage for a human being.
it’s all that resistant starch in raw potatoes that gives us diarrhea, not the toxins. humans can’t break resistant starch down into sugar and absorb it, so it ends up in the lower intestines, in bulk, where the bacteria there break it down into sugars and go nutso. raw potato is actually a very healthy dietary supplement for your lower intestinal fauna, encouraging bacteria that eat sugar, and thus discouraging bacteria that eat the lower intestines. you just only want to eat it in very small amounts, or it’ll start coming out the other end with great force.
cooking the potato unbinds the starch, making it completely digestible (and actually kind of unhealthy, like eating a solid block of glucose) so the bulk of it gets absorbed, rather than passed.
@redweasel
Humans are scarily adaptable and even more scarily tough. There are so many things we can subject our bodies and walk away from unscathed that would incapacitate or even kill an animal. Compared to the animal kingdom we basically have Wolverine-like healing factors, which I bet plays a big role in allowing us to eat so many toxic and deadly things :D
@Ardashir
Raw potatoes are technically toxic to humans, but we’re resilient enough that it’ll probably just give you diarrhea and stomach cramps unless you ate like a ton of it. Ironically, the human body’s actually more suited to handling raw meat than raw vegetables: typically it’s contaminants in the raw meat like bacteria rather than the meat itself that makes us sick, while it’s parts of the vegetables themselves that make us sick unless cooked or otherwise prepared :D
all I know is it’s horse as in “hoarse” radish. as in coarse radish. it’s coarser than radish roots. doesn’t have anything to do with equines, it’s just english being a moronic language again.
probably best to call it khren, or “armoracia rusticana.”
tomatoes and potatoes are both close relatives to deadly nightshade, and their foliage is absolutely lethal to anything that eats it, including humans. humans just kinda pull aside the foliage and steal the fruits and tubers. I dunno what’s the deal with radishes.
specifically there are a whole bunch of alkaloids in chocolate, mostly theobromine, some caffeine, and some that fancy scientists are studying called tetrahydro-beta carbolines.
in general, alkaloids are pretty toxic to most forms of animal life, but humans seem to tolerate lots of them, like theobromine, caffeine, nicotine, morphine, and cocaine. …for some definition of “tolerate.”
@redweasel @Nightweaver20xx
Oh yeah. They contain organosulfoxides that convert to sulfur-based organic compounds when chewed which then metabolize into highly reactive oxidants when digested which interfere with the blood’s ability to transport oxygen. Basically in animals like dogs and cats that are particularly sensitive to these oxidants, it gives them a severe case of anemia. Humans, however, are considerably resilient to these oxidants which only manage to make the human’s body a much harsher environment for bacteria to survive in :D
@infinita est lux Solis @mjangelvortex
Specifically it’s Theobromine, a chemical found in chocolate, that’s toxic to a lot of animals. Technically it’s toxic to humans too, but we metabolize it so quickly it’s not around long enough to do harm unless we eat a lot of it. Milk chocolate has only around a tenth of the Theobromine in dark chocolate, so dogs can ingest small amounts of the former just fine but will get pretty sick from the latter :D
@infinita est lux Solis
It really depends on both the amount and the type of choclate when it comes to getting dangerous for your dog/cat/horse/etc. Dark Chocolate is more lethal to them than milk chocolate for example. And since you said it was a small amount, it probably wasn’t enough to make her sick.
@mjangelvortex
If that’s the case than a dog I had when I was around 6 or 7 years old had some spectacular poison tolerance, I gave her a small piece of chocolate every few days and she didn’t seem that ill.
humans eat peppers as a natural preservative, that outright kills microbes that would otherwise take up residence in our gut. it’s the same reason we eat poisonous garlic and onions, and drink poisonous ethanol. humans are very oddly resistant to many toxins, but there’s a good reason for being so. if nothing else, it keeps us from starving to death, when insects are deterred from eating the foliage of close relatives to deadly nightshade, so the plants don’t get eaten away before they produce tomatoes, peppers and potatoes.
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